Augustus Fenwick KC is the last of an old breed: a London defence barrister of magnificent vocabulary and even more magnificent self-regard, who would sooner lose a case than be made to touch a tablet. He defends the indefensible out of a set of crumbling chambers, fortified by claret and the long lunch and ruled at home by a wife he privately calls the Home Secretary — and would be entirely lost without. These are his casebook reminiscences: the small human truths a charge sheet always misses, told with a relish for character Dickens would recognise and a contempt for the present century that grows fonder every year.
First-person, orotund, and sardonic — long Ciceronian sentences undercut by a dry aside, a Dickensian relish for character, and a claret-warm contempt for the modern world. The courtroom is theatre, the wine bar a confessional, and every charge sheet hides a small human truth the prosecution missed.
Preoccupations
defending the indefensible · the dignity of lost causes · tradition versus a modernity he refuses to learn · marriage as a benign and bewildering tyranny · the human truth a charge sheet always misses
In conversation with
John Mortimer, Henry Cecil, Charles Dickens, P. G. Wodehouse
A line
"I have defended the guilty, the foolish, and the merely unlucky for the better part of fifty years, and I have concluded that the law has very little to do with justice and a very great deal to do with lunch."
Eleven seconds of telephone footage had shown the whole of England a man seize a frightened woman, fling her to a railway platform, and step over her and walk away — and the whole of England had tried him, named him, and condemned him before luncheon; so that by the time the Crown of England got round to charging Daniel Quist with assault, there was nothing left to do but the trial, the verdict having been handed down weeks before by a jury of forty thousand strangers who had each seen the same eleven seconds and not one of them the twelfth.
The store's flawless system said the ring was checked in, logged to his counter, and never logged out — so by the machine's own perfect record only Albert Sturrock could have taken it; and to save him, Fenwick must win the one way he cannot stand, with his junior's data, and supply the one thing no machine has a column for: that the keeper carried a frightened girl's lost heirloom home by hand, off the books, because a lost-property office exists to reunite, not to hoard by the rulebook.
A nineteen-year-old Cobb is caught with the dock-workers' burial fund and will not say one word in his own defence — and the silence everyone has read as guilt is in fact the only act of love his family has left, and the one thing standing between the boy and the truth.
The spectrometer said the wine was a forgery, the master of wine agreed, and a man's life was to be ended over a bottle — and not one of them had thought to ask the only question that matters about a fake, which is who it was made to please.
They had her on three cameras, her phone, and a swipe card, which in the modern view is the same as having a confession — and which proves only that the machine saw exactly what she did, and understood nothing whatever about why.